An Appeal to Cultural Muslims

There are some 1.2 billion Muslims in the world, the
overwhelming majority of whom are Cultural Muslims who are
generally called moderate Muslims. Muslims are born into
Islam, where a great many never go through the process of
deciding for themselves if they want to be Muslims. It is
not a religion that they choose, it is a belief they
inherit. For whatever reason, this great majority of
Cultural Muslims are Muslims of sort without fully toeing
the line of Islam. The real Muslims are the jihadists, a
small minority who lives and dies by the dictates of the
Quran and the Sunna, the life examples of Muhammad.

The free world, rightfully alarmed by ever-varied and
escalating assaults of the jihadists, myopically has
directed its tentative and haphazard effort at countering
them, believing that by so doing it can eliminate their
threat and at the same time remain on good terms of
live-and-let-live multiculturalism with the Cultural
Muslims. This is a dangerous assumption that, if not
abandoned, will likely culminate in an Armageddon-kind of
conflagration.

There is virtually no chance of reasoning with the
brain-dead jihadists whose eyes are fixed on the promised
lush paradise of Allah. It isn’t that they love death, just
for the sake of death itself as Muslim leaders such as Hasan
Nasrullah, the head of Lebanon’s Hizbollah
proclaimed. They love death and happily embrace it
because of what they have been brainwashed to believe is
awaiting them as a reward.

Death in carrying out the work of Islam earns them entry
into Allah’s eternal sensuous male paradise, so they
believe. It is in keeping with propagating this fraud of
afterlife paradise that portraits and names of Muslim
killers, glorified as martyrs, festoon the length and
breadth of Muslim cradles of Islamism such as Iran and
Palestine. To the wild-eyed robot jihadist even a day on
this “heap of dirt” earth is simply another day of
unbearable delay from winging to the lasting abode of lust.
Why else would tens of thousands of Iranian Shi’a fools, for
instance, sign up to be martyred?

For as long as there are millions of fanatical fools, the
Islamic handlers will have an endless supply of
foot-soldiers to spread and impose the savage doctrine of
Islam and its Sharia on the people of the world. Just this
week, for instance, under the Sharia law, a
Saudi Arabian court sentenced a 75-year old widow to
prison and lashes for having “mingled” with two men who were
not related to her. The two men reportedly brought the woman
some bread. This is the kind of Sharia law that awaits us
all down the road if we fail to reach out to the Cultural
Muslims and help them leave the real Islam altogether, since
they are already partly there.

But is the real Islam indeed a peaceful religion? Are people
such as
Geert Wilders,
Robert Spencer, and
Dr. Ali Sina Islam bashers? Is the real Islam completely
innocent of all the charges liberty-honoring civilized
people level against it? Read what
Hamid Hafez, a former jihadist himself, has to say about
Islam.

Tragically, over the years, media pundits, leftist
academics, and politicians have constructed a formidable
alliance that successfully keeps both the Cultural Muslims
as well as the non-Muslim general public in a slumber of
complacency.

All along, the campaign of the jihadists has been moving
forward. On the one hand are the well-financed Islamists
with their hordes of simpletons who are ready to die for the
cause. The horrific acts of these villains are daily
occurrences in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur, and
Pakistan. On the other hand are the people of the free world
who are lulled into the complacency they seek and lack the
will to confront the deadly danger of Islamism.

The Cultural Muslims hold the balance of power in their
hands. They are not active jihadists. Yet, they knowingly or
unknowingly, constitute the most vital support for the
Islamists. It is this majority that projects an image of
normalcy and even tolerance of others while supplying funds
as well as foot-soldiers to the work of the Islamists.

Islamic apologists often point to Muslim communities in
non-Muslim lands as peaceful religious communities like any
other and deny that these Muslims pose any threat to the way
of life of the free people. Yet, the facts convincingly
argue against this fraudulent contention because, when the
jihadists gather enough local strength, the Cultural Muslims
like docile sheep will submit to the rule of their
co-religionist killers. This is not a hypothetical
prognostication. The capitulation of the Cultural Muslims
has already played out in many parts of
European towns and cities.

It is worth repeating that as Islamists wage their war under
the banner of Islam, they receive immense direct and
indirect support from the rank-and-file of Cultural Muslims.
Their support is the life-blood that keeps the Islamists
alive.

Dear Cultural Muslim, this is the 21st century. The vast
planet earth of the time of Muhammad has shrunk into a
global village. The greatly diverse and disparate peoples of
the world are now neighbors in the same village. This new
tribe of the global village is facing immense challenges and
opportunities. The resources and the talents of the various
clans can no longer be squandered on internecine fighting.
You, the Cultural Muslim are indeed the critical force that
can prevent the blaze of Islamism from engulfing the world
by completely severing your connection with a religion that
has decayed into nothing more than a cult of death.

In the 21st century, every member
of every clan of the global village, irrespective of gender,
race, or any other consideration, is entitled to full
citizenship that bestows privileges and demands
responsibilities. Radical Islam claims to be the true Islam
and strives to force humanity into submission to a system of
beliefs and practices of Sharia which are anathema to
freedom. Even Muslims who do not agree with the extremist
Islam are intimidated, pressured into silence, and even
condemned to death by the fanatics.

It is wishful thinking on the part of the non-Muslims to
believe that one can be a Muslim moderate, given that Islam
is radical at its very core. To be a moderate Muslim demands
that the person explicitly renounce much of the violent,
exclusionary, and radical teachings of the
Quran. By so doing, the individual issues his own death
warrant in Islamic countries, is condemned as apostate if he
lives in a non-Islamic land, and may even earn a Fatwa on
his head. Yet, if the masses of the Cultural Muslims, in
ones, twos, and droves leave Islam, the Islamists will be
eviscerated since the Cultural Muslims are indeed their
life-blood.

It is deadly, in any confrontation, to assess the adversary
through one’s own mental template, because the two templates
can be vastly different from each other. People in the West
are accustomed in relativistic rather than absolutistic
thinking. To Westerners, just about all matters range from
black to white with an array of gray shades between the two
poles. To the real Muslims, the Islamists, by contrast,
nearly everything is in black and white and with virtually
no shades of gray. The former type of thinking is typical of
more mature minds, while the latter is that of young
children and the less enlightened.

This absolutist thinking is enshrined in the Quran itself.
When the starting point for a Muslim is the explicit
fanatical words of Allah in the Quran, then the faithful are
left with no choice other than literally obeying its
dictates or even taking it to the next level of fanaticism.
Good Muslims, for instance, do not shake hands with women,
even though the Quran does not explicitly forbid it.
Although the Quran stipulates that men are rulers over
women, good Muslim men take it upon themselves to rule women
not much better than they treat their domesticated animals.

It is not uncommon to observe Muslims, anywhere in the
world, who are indeed exemplary in many ways. They are kind,
generous and much more. These are the Cultural Muslims who
are, in effect, only part Muslim. They do not live by the
full text of the Quran and elect to live as decent civilized
human beings. But in Islam, one cannot be a pick-and-choose
Muslim when the real Muslims take over. Clear instances of
the rule of real Islam are seen in places such as Saudi
Arabia, Iran, parts of Pakistan, Sudan, and Somalia.

Dear Cultural Muslim, while you remain silent out of fear,
lack of organization, or apathy, the Islamists work around
the clock and around the world to further their agenda.
Hardly a week passes without a Grand Mufti or an Ayatollah
issuing pronouncements in support of radical Islam. The
rank-and-file Islamist clergy, for their part, transmit
these Fatwas and edicts to their flocks in mosques and
hammer them into the minds of impressionable children in
madresehs. Through this grass-roots process, radical Islam
is recruiting greater and greater numbers of adherents. On
the one hand, the Islamists engage in acts of violence to
disrupt the functioning of societies, while on the other
they cleverly exploit the freedom they enjoy in non-Islamic
lands to subvert them from within.

Dear Cultural Muslim, you belong to free people. You cannot
have it both ways. You can’t enjoy the fruits of liberty and
at the same time hedge your bet that by being somewhat of a
Muslim you are staying in the good graces of Allah. Allah is
very non-forgiving of even the least disobedience, Muhammad
preaches. You need to make a clean break with Islam and be
an upright decent human being because it is the best reward
that one can have. No one really knows about the
confabulated Allah’s paradise. Don’t help the Islamists in
their effort to make hell out of this world hoping to find
admittance into Allah’s purported paradise.

Dear Cultural Muslim, Moderate Muslim, or any other kind of
Muslim who is not a jihadist, please courageously do what is
right: Abandon Islam altogether and enlist in the ranks of
the free where all members of the human tribe can live in
peace and harmony.

Dear Cultural Muslim, I am appealing to you. You hold the
key. You hold the balance of power. Please withdraw from
Islam completely, as countless numbers already have, and
lend your invaluable support to the free people of the world
who are eager to embrace you with open arms.

Amil Imani is an Iranian born, pro-democracy activist who resides in the United States of America. He is a poet, writer, literary translator, novelist and an essayist who has been writing and speaking out for the struggling people of his native land, Iran. Amil Imani's Home Page: www.amilimani.com.